I’ve started reading “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s latest book of essays, and I have, against all expectations, begun to like it. The first piece, “Big Red Son,” about the Adult Video News awards show, has all the humor and vitriol that makes DFW so good– and all the annoying digressions and notes and abbreviations that make his work read like notes for an article, rather than a finished product. Still, I liked it.
Even more, I liked the second piece, on Updike. I’m not a big Updike reader, but this piece is great: it manages to skewer both irrational Updike-haters and Updike’s place in the canon of postwar American fiction.
What got me started on this post, even before I’ve finished the book, is the way that DFW illustrates exactly what irritates him about Updike’s protagonist, and by extension, Updike and his entire generation of solipsistic narrators. It’s his “bizarre adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair.”
Anyway, I expected David Foster Wallace to be well written and insightful and incisive. I did not expect it to be enjoyable. This book is. Highly recommended.
Secretly Ironic 